Martin's Antarctic Visit  
January 2004  

Martin's Letter: 11 January 2004

We arrived at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, a week ago. Since it is Sunday and the station takes a break for a day to relax a little before resuming its busy schedule, I thought it a good opportunity to sit down and tell you a little about where we are and what we are doing.

McMurdo Station is on Ross Island, located in the south-western Ross Sea (see map at left). If you draw a line directly south of New Zealand, you ought to find Ross Island quite easily somewhere around 80 degrees South and 165 degrees East. The highest peak, almost 4000 m, on Ross Island is Mount Erebus, an active volcano. Thanks to the fine weather we have enjoyed since we arrived, we have frequently seen Mt. Erebus in all its glory, its smoke plume often visible rising from the lava lake in the depths of the crater.

It took five days to clear all the bureaucratic hurdles before we could go out on the sea ice to begin our work. We had to take a day long sea ice safety class, followed by "Snowcraft I", a two day excursion onto the Ross Ice Shelf to learn and practice some basic survival skills. Often referred to as "Happy Camper School", the class involves building a variety of snow shelters and, if you so choose, sleeping in one of them for a night.

We came through Happy Camper School unscathed and ready to learn how to drive a truck and a snowmachine (it doesn't matter how much experience you have with either mode of transportation, you must still take the class). Then we learned how to protect the Antarctic environment, a class sometimes known as "garbage school". Recycling is a serious business here, as almost all waste is shipped back to the United States and ultimately disposed of in Washington State. Lucky WA! I would recommend sending it all to Washington, DC, perhaps to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

We are the only science group that is permitted to go out on the landfast sea ice in McMurdo Sound. For safety reasons, further access to the ice is prohibited in about mid-December, but we have a special dispensation from the powers-that-be. We have now been on the ice twice, each driving a venerable twin-track Bombardier Alpine Skidoo towing sleds loaded with our equipment and survival bags. On both those outings we have been visited by scores of Adelie penguins, which have scurried over to see what we are and what we are doing in their territory. Yesterday there were two groups of penguins who behaved like the Cripps and Bloods: there was some serious posturing, snapping, dope-slapping and pecking going on among them.

At the core of our project is an investigation of the thermal conductivity of the ice and the heat flow through the ice (does this sound familiar to ALISON participants)? Our hope is to obtain better estimates of the thermal conductivity of the ice and identify factors that cause variability in the thermal conductivity. Computer modellers would then, hopefully, use the new and improved thermal conductivity values and obtain better computer simulations of sea ice thickness and the interactions among the sea ice, atmosphere and ocean.

The thermal conductivity values will be derived from ice temperature data that have been recorded automatically from thermistors that were frozen into the ice in April 2003. Colleagues from New Zealand installed the instruments. It is our responsibility to extract them. We should be doing that on Tuesday.

We are also taking ice cores at various locations around McMurdo Sound. Thanks to some very large icebergs that are grounded on the sea floor at the north side of Ross Island, there has been a change in the oceanography of the sound that has resulted in lower water temperatures and the survival of some of the landfast sea ice for four summers. This provides us with a rare and exciting opportunity to investigate the loss of salt from Antarctic multiyear sea ice. That might sound very esoteric, and in some ways it is, but it is also important for understanding the strength of the ice and its albedo, that is the amount of solar radiation that is reflected from the ice surface.

Thus, the final aspect of our study is to measure the albedo of the snow and ice surface. The albedo of Arctic sea ice is quite well known. The same can not be said of Antarctic sea ice, particularly multiyear Antarctic sea ice. Again, we hope that these values will ultimately find their way into computer models.

So far we have enjoyed very good weather. I have been quite surprised at the amount of sunshine. It has not been particularly cloudy and we have often been broiled under blue skies. And whether it is cloudy or not, there is 24 hours daylight, a real treat at this time of year for Alaska residents.

I hope that gives you some idea of why we are here. It is almost dinner time and then I am giving a general science talk at 8:15 with Hajo Eicken, the PI of our grant. We are going to talk about freshwater and saltwater ice variability and change, and my contribution will focus on lake ice and ALISON. There is too much Antarctic science down here so we thought we should remind people that there is another polar region!

Go to: 16 January 2004 letter.